For more than 40 years, Maine excluded religious schools from its school-choice program, but the Supreme Court in 2022 nullified that in Carson v. Makin. Prior to that decision, however, the Maine legislature changed the law, imposing requirements prohibiting Bangor Christian Schools from teaching its religious perspective – effectively requiring BCS to violate its sincerely held religious beliefs if it wanted to participate in the program.
Now, in a lawsuit filed on behalf of Crosspoint Church, which operates Bangor Christian Schools, First Liberty Institute is asking an appeals court to reverse a lower-court decision upholding the law. Jeremy Dys is senior counsel at First Liberty.
"… In Carson v. Makin … the Supreme Court [told] the state of Maine that if you're going to fund these types of schools and allow parents the opportunity to use those funds for whatever educational choices they choose to make, you cannot exclude when they use those funds for religious instruction," he explains.
But, says Dys, it is difficult for Maine's legislature to change the outdated law when loud voices from the far left are opposing religious schools in the choice program.
"We've won that issue once before the Supreme Court," he informs AFN. "I suspect we're going to have to go back to the Supreme Court to further that victory in short order."
For its first 100 years, Maine's school-choice program permitted private religious schools to participate. But in 1980 the state began excluding those schools from the tuition program, limiting participation only to non-sectarian schools. That, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote 42 years later, "is discrimination against religion" – and that having chosen to provide public funding for private schools, the state "cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious."
First Liberty points out that Maine's tuitioning program is the second oldest school-choice program in the nation. Vermont's program has served families there since 1869.
